Bili Buzz - Popular Science, Nature, Medicine, Archeology, Future & Myths

Imagine if R2D2 didn’t project images of Princess Leia, but rather an assessment of local superfund sites. Objectively, it’s nothing like the very adorable R2D2, but the Environmental Risk Assessment Rover (ERAR) by EcoArtTech is proving to be a very useful and devoted robot friend. Solar powered and GPS-oriented, the ERAR analyzes data from its surroundings, including air quality, local traffic accidents, and current terrorist warning levels. The rover breaks its findings down into fourteen unique (and pretty funny) categories, everything from “Plastic Bags� to “Regis and Kelly�, and projects them onto nearby natural surfaces. Just like the Princess Leia projection, right? Okay, not really, nor with the cute little meeps and whistles, but this thought-provoking rover sends a more urgent and critical message.

The ERAR robotic device was created by contemporary art duo Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint, who work collaboratively as EcoArtTech. Their other recent enviro-tech and transmission art works, Wilderness Trouble and Frontier Mythology, collectively explore our relationship to and interfacing with our surroundings. Via a crafted synergy between technology and the environment, EcoArtTech challenges our perception and highlights the inseparability of nature and culture.

The Environmental Risk Assessment Rover is on display at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York until June 1, 2008, as part of free103point9’s fascinating and timely exhibition Off the Grid, a dialogue between thirteen contemporary artists and the dynamic between modern energy and consumption in the modern landscape. The ERAR, like all of works exhibited in ‘Off The Grid’, are meant to conceptually challenge conventional and commercial infrastructures.

Rare albino tadpoles have been found in a garden pond in Wales.

The tadpoles have the distinctive pink eyes and off-white skin colouration associated with albinism.

Although isolated single examples of albino frogs, toads and newts have been seen before this is the first time a whole group has been found.

The exact location of the pond in Carmarthenshire is being kept secret while biologists carry out more research.

Jules Howard of Froglife, the UK wildlife charity which works for the conservation of amphibians and reptiles, said: “Sightings of albino frogs are rare so to find so many tadpoles together is exceptionally rare. It seems that the albino tadpoles are already changing colour and becoming darker so we are going to have to study their metamorphosis into frogs very carefully.”

About 10 clusters of spawn were laid in the pond and the albinos emerged from about four of them.

The pond’s owner, who first noticed the white-tinged tadpoles, said he did not see any albino frogs using the pond during the breeding season.

Albinos, more common in mammals, have inherited altered genes that do not produce the usual amounts of the pigment melanin.

Albinism is a ‘recessive trait’, so even if only one of the two copies passed down from male and female frogs is functional, offspring can make pigment, but will carry the albinism trait.

Both male and female amphibians must carry the defective albino gene to have offspring with albinism and in these circumstances there is a one-in-four chance of albino offspring being produced.

The rare discovery was reported to Froglife’s Wildlife Information Service, a public advice service encouraging people to get involved with amphibian and reptile conservation, last month and a careful watch has been maintained at the pond watching the tadpoles develop.

Froglife’s Wildlife Information Officer, Lucy Benyon, said: “This is certainly one of the stranger enquiries we’ve had recently.

“What’s unusual about this is that the batches of white tadpoles suggest that a number of adults that carry genes for albinism possibly exist in the area, not just one.”

“Usually though albino amphibians fail to live to a breeding age – their white colouration makes them a blindingly conspicuous beacon for the various animals that depend on frogs for food.”

A bird is able to make drops of water defy gravity and flow into its mouth.

A team of MIT mathematicians and engineers has shown that some shorebirds use their long, thin beaks in a tweezering motion to make prey-bearing water droplets rise upwards so they can be consumed.

The work is even more remarkable because last year a team at the University of Bristol, led by Prof Jens Eggers, thought that it was the first to make droplets flow up a slope, by vigorously vibrating the droplets, and announced the feat in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.

But now it seems that birds beat them to this gravity defying feat, probably by millions of years.

As Charles Darwin showed nearly 150 years ago, bird beaks are exquisitely adapted to the birds’ feeding strategy.

In this case the north American phalarope takes advantage of surface interactions between its beak and water droplets to propel bits of food from the tip of its long beak to its mouth, the team reports in Science.

Wildlife biologists have long noted the unusual feeding behaviour of phalaropes, which spin in circles on the water, creating a vortex that sweeps small crustaceans up to the surface, just like tea leaves in a swirling tea cup.

The birds peck at the surface, picking up tiny droplets of water with their prey trapped inside.

Since the birds point their beaks downward, gravity must be overcome to get those droplets from the tip of the bird’s long beak to its mouth.

Until now, scientists have been puzzled as to how that happens.

To unravel the mystery, Prof John Bush and colleagues built a mechanical model of the phalarope beak that allowed them to study the process in slow motion.

As the beak scissors open and shut, each movement propels the water droplet one step closer to the bird’s mouth.

In this stepwise ratcheting fashion, the drop travels along the beak at a speed of about 1 meter per second.

The mechanism depends on the chemical properties of the liquid involved, so phalaropes and about 20 other birds species that use this mechanism are extremely sensitive to anything that contaminates the water surface, especially detergents or oil.

“Some species rely exclusively on this feeding mechanism, and so are extremely vulnerable to oil spills,” said Prof Bush.

This gravity-defying action is made possible by the surface tension of water, as well as a physical effect known as “contact angle hysteresis,” which normally causes drops to stick to solids.

When combined with the tweezering motion of the beak, however, this effect enables the water droplets to rise mouthward, explained Prof Bush.